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Philip Roth was wrong

Ours is a society increasingly antipathetic to religion. When that great writer Philip Roth says that religion has a "miserable record", that he finds "all religious people hideous" and that he hates "religious lies", he is forgetting basic hard-wired, human nature. But he is not alone.

We like to consider ourselves as rational beings with little need for the spiritual and no need at all for the religious frameworks that have contributed so much to our notions of morality. Religion, it is widely claimed, has done huge harm to humans and it has been the cause of strife, suffering and conflict throughout the world.

How simplistic to blame our innate human aggression on religion. Religion is not the primary cause of strife in Kashmir or the Middle East. And it was not the underlying reason for the troubles in Northern Ireland. Nor should we blame religion for the various Crusades in Europe, the vicious massacre of the Cathars by the Catholic Church in medieval France or the horrific slaughter of Jews by Bogdan Chmielnitzki in 17th-century Poland. Such conflicts were far more about deprivation, or gaining political power, land or wealth than they were about God.

Religion may have given most of these bloodthirsty episodes a badge. It frequently provided a cohesive force, just as human ideas about nationhood and race still do - but it was hardly ever the underlying cause. Admittedly, while organised religion has frequently sanctioned and even blessed such conflicts, giving them some sense of purpose, it has rarely initiated them.

Man is a competitive creature and the seeds of conflict are built deep into our genes. We fought each other on the savannah and only survived against great odds by organising ourselves into groups which would have had a common purpose, giving morale and fortitude. Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.

And this, too, is surely true of religion. In prehistoric times, Homo sapiens was deeply endangered. Early humans were less fleet of foot, with fewer natural weapons and less well-honed senses than all the predators that threatened them. Moreover, they were hampered in their movements by the need to protect their uniquely immature young - juicy meals for any hungry beast. We had less natural protection against repeated changes of climate than other species - yet we survived. Human spirituality would have played an important part.

As well as the social cohesion that spirituality and early religious beliefs must have brought to threatened groups of humans, they must also have been a valuable mechanism to persuade humans to struggle against the odds. Surely, human spirituality is deeply embedded in our genes. Victor Frankl, in his observations about survival in Auschwitz, argued that in his view, only those inmates who had some spiritual sense, some idea that there was a power above that could see their suffering, found the strength and resolution to survive the terrible dehumanisation and deprivation of the concentration camps.

And we should never forget that we are so very fortunate to live in a society whose insistence on tolerance, notions of fairness and belief in the value of a moral framework has been strongly influenced by religious views. That Britain today is a liberal society is largely because of the philosophy and outlook of the Anglican Church, which did so much to shape our core values in the past few centuries.

So to find religious people hideous is as misguided as to condemn those driven to try to have children, or those exploring the unknown universe or creating great art. To condemn religion in this way and to forget the huge contribution it has made to human civilisations is to deny an innate part of oneself.

· The Story Of God, presented by Professor Winston, is on BBC1 on Sunday at 7pm. The accompanying book is published by Bantam.